Death of a character

No, I’m not killing off a character in anything I write. But, I do wanna discuss a character in comics that, as far as I’m concerned, was given a pretty blah ending and a hand wave death.

Cover of Huntress: Year One

The character I speak of is Helena Bertinelli, also known as the Huntress of DC Comics continuity. The Huntress was a Bat-family character, and often one that wasn’t thought of as being all together nice. But that’s probably because Helena Bertinelli grew up as the daughter to a Mafia mob boss. Her parents were killed, and she threw off the responsibility of growing up in the mob to become a vigilante. She was also a teacher, and taught class at an inner city school in Gotham.

And now she’s dead.

Well, not yet. The actual final death knell won’t be officially sounded until the first issue of World’s Finest comes out. The new series is taking a different path. Instead of being the book for Superman and Batman, it’s now the book for Power Girl and Huntress.

So, I may have confused some people now by saying that the Huntress is going to die, but she’ll be a recurring character in the ongoing series World’s Finest. Sorry about that, but now it’s time for an explanation.

Before Huntress/Helena Bertinelli, there was another one. She was from, what DC Comics called Earth 2. It wasn’t the same Earth that the Superman and Batman we’re familiar with lived, but had older versions of the characters we knew. And some differences. Including a woman called Huntress, who in her real life was known as Helena Wayne. She was the daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. That got washed away in the mega crossover of the mid 80s called Crisis on Infinite Earths. Huntress died valiantly, along side many other heroes in defending the Multiverse. She even got a decent on page death scene, one that didn’t involve kitchens or refrigerators as seems to be the case now with female characters. After Crisis, Huntress was reborn, but as Helena Bertinelli.

She was a more interesting character, to be honest. She fought actual crime, dealt with real life issues, went head to head with the Batman on many occasions because he found her methods to be quite violent. Huntress was also the only female character in the DCU to go head to head with the alien Predators when DC and Dark Horse did the Batman Predator cross overs.

And now, that version of Huntress is dead. It wasn’t a dramatic death scene, however. It wasn’t even a full page. It was just one line. Here it is in the preview to World’s Finest.